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Ubuntu 14.04 LTS

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Re: Ubuntu 14.04 LTS

#121

As someone who just installed the beta 2 on my laptop a few days ago, I have to say I'm impressed. This thing cold boots on my non-UEFI laptop in 4-5 seconds. That's at the same level as Windows 8.1, which also impressed me greatly. Now if they can only get systemd and the "online in 50ms" updates implemented, this thing will be super-sweet.

BTW I wonder why cold-boot time is so important. All my machines go back from hibernation pretty fast (in under a second), and I only cold-boot if I update something major, like the kernel or the hardware itself.

What's the point to shut down your machine, and either lose your session or wait considerable time while it restores?

Re: Ubuntu 14.04 LTS

#122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most HN readers are developers (who all have unique and specific tastes in their machine setup), and have enough experience with Linux to find it easy to install alternative window managers. For "popular adoption", I'm sure the completely standard Ubuntu install is just fine.

I sometimes feel like I'm the only developer who doesn't want to spend all his free time fiddling around with his operating system. To me, that's not developing. It's just extra work that's completely orthagonal to building cool software.

Yeah. I used to screw around with that quite a bit. At the time it was fun. Now I'm all about minimum time to productivity.

Turns out there are technical terms for the behavior. For OSes, you and I are satisficers: we just want it to be good enough. I used to be a maximizer, where I wanted it to be perfect.

Learning to choose which approach to take in a situation has been really great. For example, restaurant menus. I used to be a maximizer, trying to pick the best thing. Eventually I decided agonizing over my choice was a fair bit of stress for little or no gain; it was easy to finish my meal and think, "Damn, maybe I should have gotten that other thing." Now I just skim the menu and go with the first thing that looks good to me.

Re: Ubuntu 14.04 LTS

#123
I just upgraded on of my servers and it became unresponsive after the reboot :(

I am able to ping it but every port look like closed. Anyone have had a similar experience so far?

Re: Ubuntu 14.04 LTS

#124
post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is kind of an opinion. There is no rule book that says it needs to behave a certain way. I prefer this. In case you wanted more proof of this I think both of these are wrong and it should be by window not application. Thankfully MATE does this and is coincidentally available now in Ubuntu 14.04.

Alt+` does this, right next to Alt+Tab, within a single application. So if you wanted to pick a particular window, and you have five apps with three windows each open, instead of pressing Alt+Tab ceil~14 times, you press Alt+Tab until you have the app you want (possibly zero times) then Alt+`, potentially saving 12 or more keypresses.

Or, sometimes even better, press Alt-Tab once, then hold Alt and use your mouse to select which app then which window you want.

Re: Ubuntu 14.04 LTS

#125
post #68

Well, that was fun. The upgrade crashed halfway through. I rebooted in recovery mode, finished the upgrade using the dpkg repair option, and then restarted a few times and found that it still wasn't working. Looked like a video problem, so I checked /etc/X11 and found the xorg.conf files had been backed up and not replaced. A comment in the last one inspired me to run nvidia-xconfig and it worked fine. Pretty typical…

For an additional data point: The upgrade refused to run until I disabled some crufty PPA files I had lying around.

The upgrade itself completed successfully after I disabled them though.

Re: Ubuntu 14.04 LTS

#126
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ubuntu is more popular than you would think :). I used torrents to download it and it went quite fast (huge numbers of seeders). Here you can find torrent links: reddit.com/r/Ubuntu/comments/239wbp/1404_is_live/

I was able to basically saturate my connection downloading the torrent, 10.3mb/s. 10 hours later I'm still at a ratio of 0.038. Kind of surprising how many folks are seeding.

Yes, everyone tries to contribute with bandwidth :D. On reddit/ubuntu they advised us to do it in order to relieve some of the strain on Canonical servers and it was funny how many people were literally waiting & refreshing the page for the torrents to be available.

Re: Ubuntu 14.04 LTS

#127
post #94
post #68

Well, that was fun. The upgrade crashed halfway through. I rebooted in recovery mode, finished the upgrade using the dpkg repair option, and then restarted a few times and found that it still wasn't working. Looked like a video problem, so I checked /etc/X11 and found the xorg.conf files had been backed up and not replaced. A comment in the last one inspired me to run nvidia-xconfig and it worked fine. Pretty typical…

I know upgrades are supposed to work, but they almost never go 100% percent right. Use dpkg/synaptic to backup your installed packages and backup your /home...then commit to the time to going fresh install. If you use LTS releases, you'll only be doing it at most every other year. IMHO, it is worth the time.

I've had very good luck lately simply adjusting my sources file and typing apt-get dist-upgrade lately - though this is using Mint as the base distro (which in turn uses Ubuntu too).

Re: Ubuntu 14.04 LTS

#128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most HN readers are developers (who all have unique and specific tastes in their machine setup), and have enough experience with Linux to find it easy to install alternative window managers. For "popular adoption", I'm sure the completely standard Ubuntu install is just fine.

I sometimes feel like I'm the only developer who doesn't want to spend all his free time fiddling around with his operating system. To me, that's not developing. It's just extra work that's completely orthagonal to building cool software.

You can install and configure a suitable operating system in like 4 hours, that's not a lot of time.

Re: Ubuntu 14.04 LTS

#129
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You give zero arguments for what you consider wrong with the visual style of Ubuntu. I'm sure there are flaws that graphic designers and other people trained in the topic can point out, but until you do it's just... yeah, well, like... your opinion man. And the lack of a flat UI does not count as an argument - that's just a fashion trend. Also, my own anecdotal experience does not match yours. I often get surprised (…

They went from a brownish theme that people complained about for years to now a blackish purple that is equally gaudy. I don't understand why they can't go with a color scheme that isn't so dark and depressing. Then there are the multi-colored icon boxes (why do the icons need boxes around them at all?) that all clash with each other and clash with the (ugly) purplish theme, and clashes against the gradient black top…

Not to mention the font. I manage to ignore the wonky color themes (I picture a kid with a box of crayons having designed it), but the font is something that I desperately need consistency and beauty in, as I'm constantly reading and writing.

The default Ubuntu font is just not consistent and readable enough for a UI. They need to find something like Segoe UI, that gets out of the way and is easy to read.

I really do agree with the gp and your opinions regarding the design. It is important, and I do think Ubuntu should get some outside opinions for the next LTS and revamp their design based on some of the fundamental practices.

Re: Ubuntu 14.04 LTS

#130
post #121

As someone who just installed the beta 2 on my laptop a few days ago, I have to say I'm impressed. This thing cold boots on my non-UEFI laptop in 4-5 seconds. That's at the same level as Windows 8.1, which also impressed me greatly. Now if they can only get systemd and the "online in 50ms" updates implemented, this thing will be super-sweet.

BTW I wonder why cold-boot time is so important. All my machines go back from hibernation pretty fast (in under a second), and I only cold-boot if I update something major, like the kernel or the hardware itself. What's the point to shut down your machine, and either lose your session or wait considerable time while it restores?

Cold boot is not really that important in itself, but it's a good measure of how much needless cruft is being loaded on your system. If it boots almost instantly, you can be certain you don't have a million unneeded processes draining your battery life.

If it spends 30 seconds before you get to the login screen on good hardware, there's no telling how much things are going on and how it will affect your battery life.

A fast boot process is also telling about good engineering in general, as it implies more things are decoupled and can be loaded independently, instead of being queued in a one-by-one sequence.

So in itself, a fast boot is not that important, but when they manage to cut it in two compared to what I'm used to, that gives me confidence they are doing the right things in general.

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